* * *
I WENT BACK to the office and tried to clean out my head. It wasn’t an easy job. Being a cop rarely is, at least if you take the job seriously. My in-basket was full of paperwork. There were at least twenty messages on my machine, including two from Clete and one from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department and one from the widow of T. J. Dartez. My first call was to her.
“They say you gonna get off,” she said.
“Who did, Ms. Dartez?”
“I know you done it. You gonna lie to God? You gonna tell Him you ain’t done it?”
“I’m sorry about your husband’s death. But your husband was not sorry about the death of my wife.”
“You going to hell, you.”
My second call was to a female detective at the Jeff Davis Sheriff’s Department named Sherry Picard whom I’d never met but had heard about. She said, “Kevin Penny says you and your friend Clete Purcel are harassing him. In your case, with a pool cue.”
“Penny is a lot of laughs,” I replied. “I’ve never figured out how he stays on the street.”
“Is there a second meaning there?”
“How can I be of assistance to you?” I said.
“I doubt if you can. I’ve run Penny in two or three times. If you’ve got a problem with him, let us know. In the meantime, stay out of matters that are not in your jurisdiction.”
Clete’s messages were about the little boy Homer and the possibility that Carolyn Ardoin was in danger at the hands of Kevin Penny or Maximo and JuJu. By the time I had cleaned up my messages, my head was splitting. I went to the water cooler and took two aspirins, then returned to my office and lowered the blinds on the door glass.
Helen believed I was not responsible for Dartez’s death, but only because Baby Cakes hadn’t identified me and instead had identified Kevin Penny. In other words, I’d caught a break. The only forensic evidence against me was the smudged fingerprints on the broken window glass of Dartez’s pickup truck. I could simply say I had been at his house and touched the glass there. Except I would be lying.
In the meantime, I had interviewed Penny and later beaten him half to death with a pool cue and almost drowned him in the commode, apparently without his being completely aware that I was the man he had followed the night Dartez died. Better put, he had probably followed my vehicle rather than me.
I might skate, but Penny might also.
People are shocked when they learn that cops sometimes salt the crime scene and commit perjury. Or maybe they cancel a bad guy’s ticket and fold his hand over a throw-down and squeeze off a round with his dead finger to make sure gunpowder residue is on his person. Call it situational ethics, call it murder. It’s a big temptation, particularly when it comes to guys like Kevin Penny and perhaps even Spade Labiche.
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER, Clete got a call made by a staff member at Lafayette General. Carolyn Ardoin had been transferred from an emergency unit in Jennings and admitted at 4:16 A.M. She was in the ICU and had asked the staff member to call Clete.
“She was in an accident?” Clete said.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“How bad is she?”
“Sir, we can’t give out specific information.”
“Can you put her on the phone?”
“That’s not possible.”
“Is she going to live?”
“Sir, she’s getting the best of care. That’s all I can say.”
“Put someone on with the authority to give out information. Is there a cop there?”
“No. How far away are you?”
“Twenty miles.”